Patching Still Poses Problems for Industrial Controllers, Networking Devices
More than 90% of devices that run popular embedded operating systems remain vulnerable to critical flaws disclosed more than a year ago.
Two families of critical vulnerabilities that impact operational technology (OT), embedded devices, and network hardware continue to undermine the security of the vast majority of originally affected devices because patching the issues has been glacially slow, according to a new research report by device-security firm Armis.
Using random sampling, the company checked the patch status of devices vulnerable to flaws affecting seven vulnerable embedded operating systems, including the widespread VxWorks, which it had disclosed in July and October 2019, finding that 97% of devices have not been updated to a patched version of the software. The company also scanned a subset of Cisco network, IP phone, and camera devices for a set of five vulnerabilities disclosed in February 2020, finding 80% of those devices remained vulnerable.